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The painting — actually a study crafted ahead of a later, full portrait by Gertrude Kearns — is duly lifted and edged into place alongside the glass display case that houses the red jacket worn by Major-General Isaac Brock at the Battle of Queenston Heights, complete with hole from the musket shot that felled him.

All around, museum workers are similarly putting the final pieces in place for “1812: One War, Four Perspectives,” a 650-square-metre exhibit opening June 13 and running in Ottawa until Jan. 6, 2013.

Around a central, introductory area will be four separate galleries, like points on a compass, devoted to how each of the British, Canadians, Americans and Indians perceived a conflict that would kill about 35,000 people on all sides, including civilians.

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To Canadians, of course, it’s self-evident that the War of 1812 ended with victory over the United States. The Americans had set out with the express goal of conquering Canada and instead suffered a string of humiliating land defeats, preserving Canadian independence.

“To win, the Americans had to conquer Canada, which is not impossible until you get to Quebec City,” says MacLeod, noting how that fortress was unlikely to fall, and how easily it could receive British re-enforcements.

Hence the British strategy of leaving Upper Canada lightly defended. As long as they retained Quebec City and Halifax, the North Atlantic hub of the Royal Navy, the British figured they could easily roll back any Yankee incursions into British North America once Napoleon had been defeated.

The chief virtue of the “four perspectives” approach is that it similarly highlights just how radically divergent were the concerns and goals of the combatants, how their respective triumphs and defeats were separately viewed.

Americans may have won independence with their revolution — the one colonial Canadians opposed — but it’s the War of 1812 that really marks the beginning of national identity and symbolism on both sides of the border, whether it’s Brock and Laura Secord here, or “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Battle of New Orleans in the republic.

“This isn’t just about the War of 1812,” MacLeod says of the exhibit. “It’s about different ways of looking at history.”

That’s especially true
in the long preamble that ended with U.S. President James Madison formally declaring war 200 years ago, on June 18.

He did so for a cocktail of reasons, many of them domestic, and MacLeod agrees that no single ingredient would have been sufficient for war to ensue. Full-blown hostilities required a strange alchemy.

At the time, a newly independent United States was still politically fragile, in fiscally dire straits and marked by stark regional differences, jealously guarded. Europeans expected the whole thing to implode at any moment, as it nearly would 50 years later with the U.S. Civil War.

Many of the old wounds, Loyalist versus Patriot, lingered still in everyday politics, pitting pro-war Republicans (in the South, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee) against anti-war, pro-British Federalists (in New England, New York and New Jersey).

In Washington, the House only voted 79 to 49 in favour of war and the Senate endorsement was even narrower, at 19 to 13. As if foreshadowing future conflicts, they’d embarked on a war of choice woefully unprepared and seemingly naïve about its consequences.

Among the ostensible reasons for war was the British blockade of Napoleonic Europe, forcing American ships to stop first in Britain and pay levies before continuing to the continent. But Britain, in a bid to stave off war, had already suspended those measures more than a month earlier and sped the news across the Atlantic.

“Impressment” was another issue, the Royal Navy’s practice of boarding U.S. ships and physically removing any British subjects to serve on British ships. Just how many British-born American citizens were impressed is open to question, with estimates ranging from several hundred to 10,000.

The Royal Navy certainly had need of manpower. From just 16,600 sailors in 1793, it had grown to 119,000 within four years and stayed at that level well into the next decade during the fight against Napoleon.

By treating anyone born British to be a subject for life, Britain was effectively looking down on Americans “as residual or potential subjects, which hedged American independence,” notes Alan Taylor in
The Civil War of 1812
.

But if disrespect and haughty interference with American commerce were reasons for war, then even some Republicans mockingly noted that the United States should also declare war on France, whose attitudes and actions were analogous to those of Britain.

Directly attacking the planet’s two most powerful countries was, of course, a laughable proposition.

So the War Hawks, led by House Speaker Henry Clay, promoted an alternative nearer to hand: the conquest of Canada, Thomas Jefferson’s “mere matter of marching,” an option frontier politicians also liked for its promise of smashing British-endorsed Indian resistance to America’s westward push.

Which prompted Virginia’s anti-war John Randolph to declare: “Agrarian cupidity, not maritime right, urges the war. . . we have heard but one word — like the whip-poor-will, but one eternal monotonous tone — Canada! Canada! Canada!”

The American declaration
of war might have been a distracting little sideshow to the British, who, then as now, mostly remember the early 19th century for Trafalgar and Waterloo, not Queenston Heights and Crysler’s Farm.

But the news came like a brick to British North America. “For the Canadians, it just falls on us,” says MacLeod.

At the outset of war, there were 5,600 British regulars in Quebec, but only about 1,200 to defend all of Upper Canada. If the colonies were going to resist American invasion, part of that task would fall to Canadian regulars in fencible regiments from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Upper and Lower Canada, along with the militia.

The third leg in the defence — the Indians, led and inspired by Tecumseh — may well have been key, since nothing instilled more fear in the American ranks than the prospect of a brutal and bloody massacre at the hands of Indians.

And if there’s one “perspective” that has been insufficiently aired in the last two centuries, it’s that of the Indians in Canada and the United States.

By 1812, the American frontier was already marked by the bloody clash of Indian and American settler that would mark much of 19th-century U.S. history.

Mired in its battle against Napoleon, Britain had essentially been running a kind of balancing act — in favour of an Indian buffer zone between the Americans and the rest of the continent, but cautiously avoiding anything that might incite the Indians into fuller hostilities, lest Britain herself be drawn in.

By declaring war, the Americans simplified that equation. Canadians, Indians and Britons needed each other, so Tecumseh, dreaming of a great Indian confederacy uniting dozens of tribes, heartily threw the Indians’ lot in with the British.

“To defend themselves, they defended Canada,” notes MacLeod.

But if the Indians helped keep this country out of American hands, they ended up losing their own war against American expansion, and the turning point happened on Canadian soil with American victory at the Battle of the Thames near present-day London, Ont.

Tecumseh was killed in that fight, his body spirited away and presumably buried by his Indian brethren lest it fall into American hands.

“It marks the end of the confederacy, the end of their hope of rolling back the American settlement frontier,” says MacLeod.

After the Thames, “the Americans can roll straight to the Pacific.”

Treasured artifacts

At the Canadian War Museum’s 1812 exhibit, about half the artifacts are from the museum’s own permanent collection, but the rest come as loans from institutions across North America and Britain. “We got stuff I never expected,” says MacLeod, noting how Americans are more preoccupied with the 150th anniversary of their civil war.

Among the resulting jewels is the carved lion the Americans pilfered from the Upper Canada legislature when they looted York, now Toronto, in 1813. That arrived courtesy of the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis, Md.

There is also the U.S. copy of the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war, on loan from U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, as well as a piece of charred wood from the White House, burned when the Royal Navy sacked Washington in retaliation for the American pillaging of York and the scorched-earth policy in Niagara and what’s now southwestern Ontario.

The charred wood is part of the collection at the Gerald Ford Presidential Library and Museum.

Among other curios: Two books that had been signed out from the Niagara library before the Americans burned it. The books ended up in the archives of a local church and weren’t discovered until 2006.

“These are the oldest overdue books in Canada,” smiles MacLeod.

And there’s this, from the McCord Museum in Montreal: a proclamation poster issued by Quebec City police on June 29, 1812, which inadvertently speaks to the close social and economic ties between Canada and the United States, especially New England, on the eve of war.

“Whereas authentic intelligence has been received that the Government of the United States of America did, on the 18th instant, declare war against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and its dependencies, Notice is hereby given, that all subjects or citizens of said United States, and all persons claiming American citizenship, are ordered to quit the City of Quebec on or before TWELVE o’clock at Noon on WEDNESDAY next and the District of Quebec on or before 12 o’clock at Noon on FRIDAY next, on pain of arrest.”

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